RYAN BA­CHOO

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

As the tug-of-war con­tin­ues at the 27th Con­fer­ence of Par­ties (COP27) in Egypt, Grena­di­an Dr Spencer Thomas has of­fered a sober­ing as­sess­ment of where the re­gion is at in terms of its fight for cli­mate jus­tice.

Thomas is the am­bas­sador and spe­cial en­voy for Mul­ti­lat­er­al En­vi­ron­men­tal Agree­ments in Grena­da, and par­tic­i­pat­ed in a pan­el dis­cus­sion at the SDG pavil­ion yes­ter­day ti­tled SIDs Per­spec­tive on Loss and Dam­age. Ad­dress­ing the gath­er­ing, he said af­ter 30 years of small is­lands clam­our­ing for loss and dam­age fund­ing to be made an agen­da item, it can­not be an­oth­er 30 years be­fore im­ple­men­ta­tion and ac­tion fol­low.

Af­ter the ses­sion, he told Guardian Me­dia, “It is not a win to have it as an agen­da item. This is just one part of it. We need to have sig­nif­i­cant progress tak­ing place in the ne­go­ti­a­tions. What we have seen is we have an agen­da item but have we made any progress? Have we moved on the Glas­gow Cli­mate Pact is­sues re­lat­ing to loss and dam­age? The an­swer is no. Are we able to do that in the next cou­ple of days? We have to be op­ti­mistic and we have to con­tin­ue to ar­tic­u­late for our po­si­tion on the is­sue of loss and dam­age.”

As Thomas spoke, the Al­liance of Small Is­land States (AO­SIS) was wel­com­ing its new chair­man from Samoa, Dr Fa­tu­mana­va Pa’o Luteru.

Samoa takes the ba­ton from An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, whose Prime Min­is­ter, Gas­ton Browne, served as chair of the al­liance for the last two years. Samoa’s term as chair comes at a crit­i­cal time, with loss and dam­age fund­ing at the top of the glob­al agen­da at these cli­mate talks.

Yes­ter­day, the Eu­ro­pean Union’s cli­mate chief, Frans Tim­mer­mans, an­nounced the union will pro­vide 60 mil­lion eu­ros to the glob­al shield to help coun­tries af­fect­ed by loss and dam­age from cli­mate change.

Re­act­ing to the change in lead­er­ship at the top of AO­SIS and what it means for small is­land de­vel­op­ing states, Dr Thomas ex­plained, “I think the size of the task in the next two years de­pends on the de­ci­sion that we take to­day and I think be­fore the end of this COP we need to make sig­nif­i­cant and am­bi­tious de­ci­sions on the is­sue of loss and dam­age. I don’t think we can fall short of hav­ing very sig­nif­i­cant am­bi­tion, mit­i­ga­tion and adap­ta­tion and fi­nance on loss and dam­age at this COP.”

How­ev­er, it re­mained un­cer­tain up to yes­ter­day whether there has been any re­al progress on the loss and dam­age front.

Still, Dr Thomas of­fered this per­spec­tive, “I think we are more or less walk­ing back­wards in the ne­go­ti­a­tions. I think we have had a plat­form set in Glas­gow and the idea here was to build on that plat­form. What we are see­ing here is a back­slid­ing on that plat­form so I’m not con­fi­dent that at the end of the day, we will be able to get to the point where we are hop­ing to which is nec­es­sary for the sur­vival of our coun­tries as we go for­ward.”

This ar­ti­cle was pub­lished with the sup­port of Cli­mate Track­er.